Getting the most out of your product development process

Abstract

Despite meticulous planning, are your company’s product development projects stuck in seemingly permanent logjams, running months behind schedule? If so, you may be viewing product development as a list of individual projects. But product development is a complex process that can be streamlined and accelerated. To get your new offerings to market more quickly, you need to know how many projects your company can handle—which means attending to employees’ and depart- ments’ capacities and workloads. And that requires a strategic view of your entire prod- uct development process—not just individ- ual projects’. By replacing project management with process management , you exploit similari- ties across project tasks through standard- ization and continuous improvement— without destroying creativity. You also re- lieve bottlenecks, finish projects faster, and smooth out workloads. Results? A 30%–50% reduction in time to market.